Anand’s Realism In Indian Novels

Untouchability is so deep ischolar_mained in the Indian society that we can still see the effects of it on the fringes of modern India. On the face of it everyone acts as if they do not discriminate, but where do the Hindus go with a century of consciousness and conditioned mind that lived in the society where the caste system is still rampant. Change is coming, not in the offing, but slowly and Mulk Raj Anand was able to bring out the subject of this discrimination which prevailed in the Hindu dominated India.

Bakha is a young man, proud and even attractive, yet none the less he is an outcast in Hindu Indian caste system: an Untouchable. In deceptively simple prose this groundbreaking novel describes a day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, as he searches for a meaning to the tragic existence he has been born into - and comes to an unexpected conclusion.

Mulk Raj Anand in his first novel Untouchable (1935) has shown that none of the western theoretical models of attaining social justice are successful in the Indian context.  The Rousseauistic, the Hegelian and the Marxist models, were not appropriate in theorising the tragedy of Bakha’s deterministic existence and the stubborn order of the Hindu caste system that is responsible for the creation of the Bakhas of society. Ironically, the ‘lowest dregs’ of mankind in western literatures can at least rebel, but Bakha as an untouchable by birth, cannot even dream of it. Munno, the ‘hero-anti-hero’ of Coolie (1936), being a ‘Kshatriya’ who is not enslaved by caste, can at least fight back. While Bakha’s complicated existence as an untouchable is based on the ‘varnashram’ structure of Hinduism, Munoo’s fate as a rickshaw-puller is tied to his dehumanising work as a coolie. The fact remains that both Bakha and Munoo are helpless labourers whose work has been permanently devalued and misappropriated. However, Anand was capable of stretching the metaphors of untouchable and coolie to a universal scenario suggesting that the predicament existed universally. In other words, still the major part of humanity comprises either untouchables or coolies. Thus the two metaphors can undoubtedly be considered as collective metaphors of sociology, history and metaphysics of human suffering and man’s inhumanity to fellow